Ten Tips For Landing Your Perfect Sponsor

Landing your perfect sponsor can be challenging. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I ran a charity event a few years back. The biggest challenge by far wasn’t the logistics of space booking, nor was it managing volunteers. It was landing your perfect sponsor that’d provide with the necessary funds, prizes, and equipment to run things adequately.

I’m certain my experience isn’t particularly unique. As an event organizer, there’s a high probability that you’ll occasionally need to supplement your budget with a sponsorship or two. Getting in touch with the necessary organization can seem complex, daunting, and downright overwhelming – but it doesn’t need to be.

Today, I’m going to go over a few best practices that every event management professional should engage in when seeking a sponsorship.

These tips for landing your perfect sponsor will help you streamline the process and find a partner that aligns with your goals.

Know Your Demographic

One of the first tips for landing your perfect sponsor is understanding your event’s audience. Sponsors want to know who they are reaching by supporting your event.

Conduct research to gather demographics and behavioral insights about your attendees. This data will not only help you craft a compelling pitch but also show sponsors how your event can help them reach their target market.

Compile A List Of Prospective Sponsors

Once you’ve a notion of who you want to serve with your event, the next step is actually a pretty simple one. Look at a list of organizations that are affiliated with your industry and audience. Compile a list of companies that might potentially be interested in helping your event out.

When putting together this list, The Practical Sponsorship Ideas Blog recommends you consider the following factors:

• What products or services does the company specialize in?
• Who are their primary competitors?
• What connection do you have to the sponsor, if any?
• How much would they likely be willing to offer, at most?
• What competitors do you have in this industry? Is your sponsor likely to have associated with them in the past?

Don’t Just Focus On The “Big Guys”

While everyone dreams of securing a large, well-known sponsor, smaller companies can be just as beneficial, if not more. In fact, smaller brands often offer a more personal touch, and may be more inclined to partner with you since they’re eager to grow their exposure.

Craft A Quick, Personalized Pitch For Each Sponsor – And Make It About Them

In a way, pitching to a sponsor isn’t all that different from pitching a business to a group of investors. In both cases, you’re going to want to start with a teaser – and you want it to be about the sponsor, not the event.

Consider what the sponsor gets out of backing you. What will your event do for their brand, exactly? why should they care?

“Plan to pause after delivering your teaser to allow it to settle in for a few seconds,” advises Demand Media’s Kevin Johnston.

Once you’ve (hopefully) hooked your sponsor with the teaser, describe in brief what you’re trying to accomplish with your event, then go on to explain what direct benefits it’ll have for their company. It’s imperative that you show you’ve a clear understanding of their brand here. What are their goals, and how can you help them accomplish those goals?

It goes without saying that you’re going to need to do a fair bit of research into each sponsor in order to make your pitches as authentic as possible. Check out the company website, look at any branding they’ve placed around the Internet, look for them on social media, and search up any news/information about them that you can find on Google.

To refer back to the Practical Sponsorship Ideas piece, you should analyze your relationship with each partner based on the following factors:

1. Relationship: Have you worked with this sponsor in the past? Do you have some sort of existing relationship with them? The better they know you, the likelier they’ll be to respond when you reach out.
2. Objectives: What are they trying to accomplish, and how well does your event help them accomplish this?
3. Audience: How similar is their target audience to your target demographic?
4. Competition: Does their competition often sponsor events in order to market themselves?
5. Attributes:  How closely does the atmosphere of your event match the values of the sponsor? Disney, for example, is family-oriented, and wouldn’t generally support an auction carried out by a casino chain.
6. Geography: Are they based out of the same region as you? A UK-based company isn’t likely to respond to a sponsorship request from a Canadian event management firm.
7. Comfort: Is the sponsor comfortable with sponsoring your event? If they aren’t, can you convince them sponsorship’s in their best interests?
8. Size: How large is the sponsor compared to the level of value your event provides? Apple probably won’t be willing to sponsor a food drive for a local Girl Scouts group, but it’d likely throw its weight behind a massive international tech conference.

Now, the piece advises you to rank each trait on a compatibility matrix, but that’s not entirely necessary. It’s probably enough to examine each sponsor in the context of the above factors; you should be able to get a decent feel for who you should and shouldn’t reach out to.

Offer Extra Incentives, With Different Sponsorship “Levels

Our next tip comes courtesy of Idealist’s Rebecca Mojica, who advises that event organizers set up several different ‘levels’ of sponsorship that businesses can buy into. Each level, naturally, will offer a unique set of incentives.

These levels will be set at different financial endpoints depending on the size of your event, with higher ‘levels’ offering greater benefits.

“You should base your sponsor levels on the benefits to the company,” Mojica writes. “Put a price on each benefit you’ll offer and add the prices in each level. This will give you an idea as to the cost of a sponsorship.”

“Know in advance that you may have to be flexible and customize levels for some sponsors to meet their marketing needs,” she continues. “Some sponsors might be interested in a half cash, half in-kind (product donation) sponsorship.

Food and beverage companies often would like to see their logo on T-shirts, hear their company name announced, etc. They may want to have a table or booth available to distribute their products.”

She concludes with a list of possible ‘rewards’ you could offer:

• Sponsor banner displayed at event
• Sponsor name announced at event
• Dinner table supported by sponsor (i.e., each person at the table receives a promotional item and literature from the sponsor and the sponsor’s logo is displayed at the table)
• Small sponsor banner or logo displayed on podium
• Sponsor name or logo in organization’s newsletter
• Sponsor name or logo in advertisements in newspapers and magazines
• Sponsor ad in program or flyer (ad size can range from business-card size to full page)
• Sponsor logo on organization’s website (can include a hotlink to their site)
• Sponsor logo on T-shirt
• Category exclusivity (a guarantee to sponsors that once they sign on, none of their competitors will be allowed to sponsor).

Always Follow Up

Securing sponsorships is about building long-term relationships. Always follow up after meetings or proposals, thanking sponsors for their time and expressing your eagerness to work with them. Even if they decline, maintaining a positive relationship could lead to future opportunities.

Consider Using A Sponsorship Platform

Here’s something a lot of event organizers don’t consider – I know I certainly didn’t. If you’re stuck on where to make up the gaps in your event’s budget, why not look into crowdfunding? Platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are positively huge right now, and there are plenty of sites – such as Sponsor My Event  – that are tailored specifically to event managers.

Make Sure Your Supplementary Stuff Looks Awesome

Just as you’re going to be doing a bit of research into your sponsors, you should expect them to look into your event. If you’ve an obtuse registration page, an unprofessional-looking Twitter feed or no presence at all on social media, that’s going to make a pretty awful first impression.

You need to make sure all the content you’re using to support your event – from your registration platform to your Facebook Page to your firm’s website – looks good, and presents you in as positive a light as possible.

Promote As Much As Possible

You already know that you need to promote your event as much as possible – the same is generally true of your sponsors. You need to make sure you deliver on any promises you made to them, after all. The best way to do that is to include them in your event marketing and materials.

Avoid Middlemen

One last piece of advice in landing your perfect sponsor before we wrap things up – avoid submission forms, sponsorship managers, and agencies. The former two are just there as gatekeepers, with no real power to influence the decisions of the prospective sponsor.

The latter, meanwhile, is generally just an individual or firm looking to make a profit off of something you can honestly do yourself.

There’s one thing worth noting here, of course. While you should avoid people who aren’t decision-makers, you also shouldn’t go right to the top. The CEO of a fortune 500 company has better things to do than respond to every sponsorship request.

Closing Thoughts

Trying to find someone to sponsor your event can be an intimidating task. It doesn’t need to be. So long as you know your firm and follow the advice laid out here, you should have no trouble tracking down the perfect partners for whatever event you’re running.